“I’m rational, unlike you, and if you look at this supposed problem rationally, you’ll understand that it can’t possibly be real because I politically disapprove of some of the proposed solutions.”
— Just about every conservative comment on climate change I’ve seen on Quora.
Gotta love it when the camera’s autofocus insists gives you this wonderfully clear image of…the grass in front of the skittish animal you’re trying to get a picture of before it scampers away.
I did manage to get one shot of it before moving on, and then I was able to spot a clearer view of another rabbit during the same hike.
The last few hikes I’ve done at Madrona Marsh, I’ve taken a lot fewer photos. This time…I went a little overboard taking pictures of just about every type of plant or animal I could to post to iNaturalist. Then I narrowed it down to around 40 “good” photos that I’m posting on Flickr over the next week or so. Sadly, my camera battery ran out about halfway through, leaving me with only my phone. Which was perfectly fine for close-ups and landscapes, but not for zoom shots.
Not sure if this sign is in Qbert-ese or represents a store that’s named for a swear word…
Two views of a 22-degree circular halo around the sun that I saw on a walk this afternoon.
Halos are a lot more common than I used to think. Then I started actually looking for them. Even on a warm day like today, there can still be ice crystals higher in the atmosphere of the right size and shape to cause a display like this (or even more complicated ones).
Usually I just go for a utilitarian, “got a picture of the halo,” but this time I tried about five different things to block the sun, trying to compose an interesting shot as well. I’m going to have to keep that up!
To keep myself from getting distracted by too many notifications on my phone, I ask myself the following questions whenever a new category pops up:
Then I turn off what I don’t need, turn off sound on the less urgent ones, and customize sounds for the most important ones.
So I hear when a text or instant message comes in, but not email or social media. When I pick up my phone I see emails, mentions & replies, but not favorites or boosts, etc.
It helps me a lot with alert overload. YMMV.
Found this yesterday at a used book/media store.
I think I may have heard it back in the day, though the only thing that comes to mind is “Macho Duck.”
No, I didn’t buy it.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to self-host a service, and that there are degrees even within that.
I have a self-hosted WordPress blog in the sense that I manage an installation of WordPress, but I run it on a VPS at a web host. It’s not as self-hosted as someone running a server on a Lollipop Cloud or FreedomBox, but it’s more self-hosted than someone using WordPress.com. It’s also more self-hosted than someone using the managed WordPress hosting at the same web host.
The key advantages of self-hosting are privacy and control. Unless a service uses end-to-end encryption, the admins at each level can probably read your stuff – you have to trust that they won’t do it unless they have to.
And of course when you run your own service, you don’t have to fear losing control when Google Plus shuts down, or Flickr changes their pricing structure, or Tumblr changes their TOS, or MySpace botches a server migration.
The obvious disadvantage of self-hosting, of course, is that you’re on the hook for all the maintenance. Spam filtering, moderation, security updates, server migrations – those are all on you.
And unless you’re using your own software, even on your own box there’s still the risk that a project is going to shut down & leave you without security fixes, or pivot to a new direction that no longer fits what you want. (So glad WP’s block editor is still optional!)
I’ve settled on a balance where I manage the top-level web apps, but my webhost handles the hardware, the virtualization and the LAMP stack. (And email. Ugh, I’d forgotten how much of a pain a mailserver can be to handle until I tried to set one up on a Raspberry Pi a couple of months ago.)
I guess I’m kind of splitting the difference. 🤷
